Route and Track Modes

Most formats supported by GPSBabel will make a reasonable attempt to work
transparently with waypoints, tracks, and routes. Some
formats, like garmin and magellan require the -t flag to work with tracks and
-r to work with
routes. -w is for
waypoints, and is the default. So if you wanted to read all
data from a Magellan Meridian GPS receiver into a gpx file, you might use a command
like:

gpsbabel -t -r -w -i magellan -f com1: -o gpx -F backup.gpx

Tracks and routes are advanced features and don't try
to handle every possible hazard that can be encountered
during a conversion. If you're merging or converting files
of similar limitations, things work very well.

Many of those hazards can be overcome with our filters
but there are often compromises to be made. For example, if you
have a GPX route that contains 150 turn points but you're sending
the route to a GPS receiver that supports only 30 turnpoints, something has
to go. One might use our 'simplify' filter to produce a route that
retained the 30 most mathematically significant turnpoints but that
may not really be the route you had in mind.

Tracks and routes will sometimes be converted to a
list of waypoints when necessary, One example is when writing into one
of the CSV formats. The inverse operation is not supported
right now, so reading the converted track back from CSV will
always result in a list of waypoints, not the original track.

The presence of -s on the command line tends to
creats havoc on tracks and routes since many of these formats
rely on internal linkages between such points and renaming
them may break those linkages. In general, don't use
-s when tracks or
routes are present.